


Pay When You Can: Epilogue

by fadeverb



Series: Kai and Mannie [20]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 04:55:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over in Heaven, there are still a few loose ends to tie up from <em>Pay When You Can</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pay When You Can: Epilogue

**An Epilogue, In Which We Discuss Demon-Handling Techniques**

I'm never more myself than when I'm in Heaven, but frankly there's something to be said for sticking to the corporeal where certain things can't get to me. Like the Halls of Creation, and the way they're so _empty_ these days. They don't exactly echo, because you only get echoes in Heaven when someone's decided that's a good idea, but they've got that echoey sort of feel, with only a few people passing through here and there when there used to be crowds, absolute crowds of angels and souls. Flocks of relievers everywhere.

The relievers still form at the tops of the Tethers, but these days they flit off to join other flocks. Wind and Lightning and Fire and Animals and...oh, well, most everything except for Creation, because Dad's not here, and most of his kids are off working for other people. Just like I am.

There's a staircase I visit sometimes with steps made by all sorts of different relievers. Mine is right next to Jack's, and sometimes I can't remember which of the two I did, and which was his. We helped each other with our projects, see.

I spin in place for a while, and then I fly away. Out a wide open window into the sky, where I can look down across the cathedral, across the Groves and the Savannah, over to the spires of the Eternal City, with all of the Bazaar stretching between. If I wanted to, I could travel all the way to Gabriel's Volcano, and...

Oh, who am I kidding? I'm heartsore, like an ache through my rim, and it's calling me to find the people I love because there's someone I love who I can't find.

I know the fastest way to the Halls of Progress, and that's what I take. A few Ofanim of the Wind see me streaking through the sky, and zip up to race me. A brilliant whirlwind of fire, one of them, another's an endless tangled knot of this blaze that makes us ourselves, and the third's like me, a single smooth ring.

"What's the hurry?" calls the fastest, outpacing all of us, and the two beside me shout back, "Life's always a hurry!" A call and response, and they laugh, spin away from me as my path takes me further from the Groves and nearer to the gleaming Halls of Progress.

I whirl through the literal halls, dodging scientists of all manner and the support staff that make up the people who do _work_ around here. Which would not be me, despite the office they gave me, and I finally figured out that they gave me the room for about three reasons: to give me a place to put my stuff, so that people could leave messages for me more easily, and so that if I got the urge to bring a pack of relievers with finger paints inside, I'd bring them to my own space first, and maybe give up on the notion of letting them paint all these clean walls more exciting colors before my office was finished.

Though I only did that once. That made it out of the wing where my office is, anyway. And I helped clean up afterwards! So they don't have any room to complain, and if they don't want me painting the walls, they ought to come up with some more exciting decorations around here. The Halls of Progress are so sterile. You'd think all the scientists would be languishing around in boredom, except I've never seen a bit of languishing in here.

Mannie does sulk, though. And huddle grimly. Terrible habits, which we can blame on his upbringing.

He's not in his office, which I check first. I spin over to Gariel's office, and whirl around in polite silence in the doorway until my supervisor finally raises his head from the computer screens to blink at me. No one else blinks so well as Seraphim; Kyriotates have more eyes for it, but they don't tend to get the unison thing down so well. "Auto lab," he says, extending a wing.

"Thanks!" And off I go again.

Mannie and Nosha are bent over the best car ever--which is distinct from the best motorcycle ever, that being mine, and a shiny present from an Archangel, which might be called a bribe if you look at it from a certain angle but I still say was a fair reward for work done, so there--with Mannie's sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his hands in the engine, while Nosha waves some sort of scanner over it. "Hello, Kai," Nosha says, and turns its enormous eyes towards me. "Please don't touch anything."

"Wasn't planning on it," I say, and orbit the car while Mannie finishes up with whatever it is he's doing in its guts. I do not get the technical stuff, and we all figured out years ago that it's pretty much for the best if I don't try. "Are you not working on the summoner thing anymore?"

"They sent it back to alpha," Mannie says, frowning intently at a piece of equipment I could not identify. He holds it out, and drops it with a clatter onto a tray Nosha offers. "It was agreed upon by all that the power draw was unacceptable."

"We also heard about the noise issue," Nosha says cheerfully. "From places _miles_ away. Who knew angels were allowed to swear like that?"

"Who knew that Animals knew all those multisyllabic words?" Mannie mutters, and wipes his hands clean on a pale blue towel. Then he steps away from the car so that I can wrap around him, one ribbon of fire coiling ankles to neck for an instant. "The project lead said he would send me a note when they had fixed enough of those problems to address the power issue again. God knows they're likely to make it worse meanwhile, if they keep patching bugs by adding new control systems instead of simplifying down to a multi-use--" He pauses, and says, "Never mind," then gives me a proper hug. Crackling lightning-pattern wings wrap around us, electric blue to my bright red, and that's right and proper.

I've lost someone, and I've gained some other people, and it doesn't balance. It doesn't. People aren't numbers, you can't do math on relationships. But I still have people here, just like I have an Archangel to serve even while Dad's off doing his work on the corporeal.

"I'm not feeling so great," I say, though from the way Nosha's packing things up, it already noticed. "Do you mind if I borrow Mannie for a while?"

"Feel free," Nosha says. "I've been assigned the job of writing all the apology notes, and I may as well stop putting it off." It curves a purely Elohite smile up at Mannie's sidelong look. "I've been putting it off objectively, dear, and I seem to have run out of more important things to do first."

I unwind to give Mannie room to move, and follow him down the hall back to his office at a sedate pace. A downright leisurely pace. Gamma and Strange spark past us, too fast to even leave greetings in their wake, and I want to go running too, but that's the thing, really: even Ofanim can't run away from what this feels like. It sticks with you wherever you go, until you find a way to deal with it.

"I am sorry," Mannie says, once the door's closed behind us. "If there had been any other way I could think of--"

"But there wasn't," I say, because I don't want him hurting too. It was bad enough the way he looked at me when I had to walk into that building barely able to get my feet working properly, and he knew what I was about to see. Except I already knew, just from hearing. From what the situation was. "Don't apologize. We do our best, and it's not your fault--or even mine, whatever he's said--that Jack decided to do that."

"Besides," Mannie says wryly, "he did try to shoot me first." He sits down in his desk chair, and shoves it out into the center of the room so that I can orbit around him properly. Some days I'd roll round about, make a pattern of it, but this time I just settle my ring around him and spin there. Planets around the sun, electrons around the nucleus...

I don't know what I would do if they took him away, and I will never let them. And when I think about that, I understand why he gets so upset every time I get into trouble down on the corporeal. It's not because I take some damage--even though he doesn't much like that--but because of what it makes him wonder about. The worst kind of maybes.

"What about that commander? The one who led them in? Pick up anything on her?"

"No," he says, and frowns at this. "Not a single Need that I was willing to fill, among those few I was able to. Which is a pity. I would like to find her again and continue the discussion. If the Sword would simply let us work with that Song of theirs that they're so precious about, and let us put together bullets that could kick demons out of their vessels..."

"Then probably some demon would run off with one, reverse-engineer it, and make us unhappy," I say. "Still, it's always nice to dream?"

"Don't we just," he says, and reaches out an arm so that his fingers brush against my inside rim as I spin. "I kept a hook on that Calabite they let _assemble the equipment_ , which makes me wonder if they were planning on doing anything with it other than making it explode. I would have expected more long-term thinking out of the War, even if Fire can't be expected to think further than the first boom. The project lead started twitching when I had to explain that part to her."

"Oh, Mannie," I say, "that's not very nice. She did help me out, you know. As best she could, and more than I would've expected of any demon who wasn't running straight for a Tether."

"Which she didn't," Mannie points out, "so you may be glad later that I kept that. If she shows up in the Halls of Progress, I'll certainly drop the hook then. Otherwise, policy states that what hooks I can find on demons, I keep."

"You only quote policy when you're justifying something you want to do anyway," I point out, and speed up slightly. The talk and the touch and the way we can move on to other matters, they all make me feel better. I can't run away from what hurts, but I can move on. That's what Ofanim do, right there. Dwelling in the past doesn't help, and on we go.

"Yes," Mannie says, without a hint of apology. Good. "Now, will you help me explain to Maharang why she can't go back to the corporeal yet?"

"Nope," I say, "but I'll go talk with her about some new ways to watch out for incoming danger when she does head back down. She has a Role to keep up, and you can't keep her up here much longer. She has work to do."

"It's not her job to be shot at," Mannie says.

"So we'll try to work out how to make that happen less. But she'll be fine. She's smart and _way_ more sensible than I am. For instance, she's never yet been tranqed and tied up in a basement, so that's doing pretty well!"

"Not your fault," Mannie says, and pokes me in the ring. Tickles. "Though I wish you'd stop having these--conversations with demons. And the agreements. They so often end with you bleeding, or resonated, or otherwise--in trouble."

"Yes," I say, and wrap myself into a double loop to spin him about in his chair. "But I'm not going to stop. Once in a while, they _do_ follow me home."

"True," Mannie says, and there's a smile out of him. Good.


End file.
